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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Commercial Avenue',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/07/11.jpg" alt="Signs marking the intersection of 32nd St and 33rd St" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		I don&apos;t remember most of the dream, but I in the end of it, I was tracking down a huge spider in my home.
		I&apos;d seen it scurry after I&apos;d knocked something over.
		When I finally caught up to the thing, its body alone was about seven centimetres long.
		Each leg extended off the body about sixteen centimetres.
		The thing was scary and I wanted it out of my house!
	</p>
</section>
<section id="day_off">
	<h2>My first real day off in a while</h2>
	<p>
		I still had some work today, but not enough to really worry about, so I took the beginning of the day off and went for a bike ride.
		My first stop was that food truck from yesterday.
		They were closed, so I continued on to 7-ELEVEn, a convenience store chain in my country.
		On July eleven (&quot;07-11&quot;) every year, they give out gratis slushies as a promotional item to increase brand awareness.
		The timing couldn&apos;t be better.
		I&apos;m in the northern hemisphere, so it&apos;s summer in July; just the time when you&apos;d most <strong>*want*</strong> a slushy.
		I returned to the food truck to find it still closed.
		Upon closer inspection, they have a sign saying they&apos;ll be closed all day, but open again tomorrow.
		So I ate at the neighbouring food truck instead.
		This truck only has one vegan item, unlike the other which exclusively serves vegan dishes, so it wasn&apos;t difficult to make up my mind as to which to get.
		The burrito was good, but a little spicy.
		I might get it with a different sauce if I were to order again.
	</p>
	<p>
		Not wanting to return home just yet, I continued down Main Street to reach the second and only other 7-ELEVEn in my city.
		I&apos;ve never gone there before, so I wasn&apos;t quite sure where it was, but I knew it was quite a ways down the same street as the other one.
		Wow.
		It was further than I&apos;d imagined.
		I had to bike all the way to fifty-eighth street before I arrived.
		A few times, I wondered if I was even right about where it was.
		For reference as far as distance, I live on Pioneer Parkway, which is basically Second Street; it comes right before Third.
	</p>
	<p>
		I started back along the sane route: Main Street.
		But then I decided I wanted to see some different scenery.
		Maybe I&apos;d see something interesting.
		I turned down some random street; I don&apos;t even recall which one.
		The goal was simply to go down a couple blocks and continue parallel to Main Street.
		But that&apos;s where things started to go south.
		I came across Commercial Avenue.
		Commercial Avenue is a terrible street.
		It&apos;s curved, so you end up having to turn away from your destination, and has almost no streets that cross it.
		I mean, one side of the street has streets that dead end into it, but of course it&apos;s always the <strong>*other*</strong> direction that you need to go, and that side never has any streets leading away.
		Due presumably to the curved nature of Commercial Avenue, other streets in the area behave strangely as well.Streets that would normally be parallel are found to be perpendicular, and vice versa.
		It&apos;s a nightmare.
		The place is a time-eating trap.
	</p>
	<p>
		Of course, I normally avoid the area.
		No good can come from trying to navigate through that part of town.
		But though I knew it was a bad idea even at the time, I turned down Commercial Avenue.
		I wouldn&apos;t be there long, I&apos;d just turn again a couple streets down.
		It&apos;d be fine, right?
		Wrong.
		I couldn&apos;t head in any useful direction, got turned around, then got lost.
	</p>
	<p>
		I found a small park at what appeared to be a dead end, but from the right angle, you could see a bike path leading to the next street.
		I told myself I&apos;d remember the park&apos;s name, but I&apos;ve forgotten it.
		I eventually ended up on a curved road leading both to and from the opposite ways I thought I needed to go.
		There was a field, but with the hedges and building side, I didn&apos;t think I could cross it, even on foot, carrying my bike.
		I&apos;ve had to backtrack, but previous pedestrians had created a path, killing the grass underfoot.
		The path showed me the one break in the hedge, so I could keep moving forward.
		Eventually though, I got to the intersection of Thirty-Second and Thirty-Third though.
		Like I said.
		Streets that shouldn&apos;t cross do here.
		Soon after that point, I utterly gave up.
		I tried backtracking a bit, attempting to move the wrong direction, back closer to Main Street.
		I ended up making it all the way back to Main Street before finding a single parallel road I could use.
		I&apos;d wasted a bunch of time and energy, and in the end, ended up about where I&apos;d started.
		At least Main Street behaves sanely though, so I was able to take it to a more-familiar part of town, where I peeled off again with much better success.
	</p>
	<p>
		Anyway, I need to react more appropriately when I run across Commercial Avenue.
		The area shouldn&apos;t be used as a change of scenery while heading somewhere else.
		If I ever have something actually in that area I need to do, then fine.
		But if I don&apos;t, I should take a different path.
		Every time.
		No exceptions.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			It&apos;s funny you assume I&apos;m a &quot;Mr&quot;.
			I&apos;m more of a Mx Yst than a Mr Yst.
			It&apos;s an easy mistake though.
			Alex can be short for Alexander, but is can also be short for Alexandra, Alexandria, Alexa, Alexia, and Alexis, just to name a few.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			First of all, a week&apos;s not much time to research a culture, with nothing to go off of.
			Second, how do you expect me to research horror of my culture?
			As I said, I&apos;m not a part of pop culture; I&apos;m a part of free culture.
			Free culture doesn&apos;t get the kind of advertisement pop culture does, so it&apos;s much harder to track down.
			Third, that week I mentioned?
			Actually, try a couple days.
			The initial discussion posts are supposed to be submitted near the beginning of the week so people have a chance to respond to them.
			Tracking down what free culture finds horrifying (besides dreaded copyright laws) isn&apos;t the type of challenge to be completed in a couple days, especially when that&apos;s not my only work for the week.
		</p>
		<p>
			Like you said, you tracked down some legends of Britain in that time.
			But there in lies why you found it so easy: your research was directed at a particular place.
			When you research culture that way, what you get is <strong>*pop culture*</strong> of the area.
			Free culture doesn&apos;t know national borders.
			Like I said, the pop culture of my area is not the culture that I&apos;m a part of.
			I could have easily looked up some pop culture of the area, but that was not at all the assignment.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I agree that not having a television is a positive thing, but I don&apos;t do it for the right reasons.
			I can&apos;t support the networks that find their way onto television.
			They&apos;re copyright hoarders, which directly goes against my culture; my culture is one of reuse and adaptation.
			In fact, copyright law stifles creativity, causing culture (<strong>*any*</strong> culture that it touches) to stagnate.
			Culture grows and mutates by building on past versions of itself and copyright law doesn&apos;t allow for that.
			Honestly, if there was a free culture television service, I&apos;d probably get a subscription, even if the subscription fee was a bit higher than that of pop culture television.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Yeah, fair enough.
			If a shark was spotted, I&apos;d probably stay out of the water too, just in case.
			I&apos;m not the type to take unnecessary risks.
			Still, if I was in the water when alerted to the presence of the shark, I wouldn&apos;t panic unless there was some indication that it was violent or angry.
			I&apos;d just calmly head for shore.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Yeah, I unfortunately know what you mean.
			I&apos;m a bit eccentric (not asymmetric, ha ha).
			I think it might be at least in part because I&apos;m a queer.
			We queers are known to be oddballs.
			While I haven&apos;t seen any research as to why, I suspect it has to do with our mixed up brains.
			Studies have shown that queer brains are partly like male brains, but partly like female brains.
			This mix is the cause of our identities and sexual orientations, but I suspect the mix also causes our unusual personalities.
			Put simply, we view the world differently than those around us.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Yes, I agree that evil causes harm, destruction, or misfortune.
			However, we all have different ideas of what constitutes harm, destruction, or misfortune.
			For example, it&apos;s commonly believed that using an idea someone else came up with harms that person.
			Copyright law and patent law are in place to prevent that.
			However, I believe that stopping the spread of ideas is a misfortune, and greatly harms society.
			It stagnates progress and holds us back as a people, by destroying the possibility of many new creations that would have otherwise added to either our culture or our technology.
			I further believe that to give someone an idea and not let them use it to the fullest extent harms that individual, as it&apos;s a form of censorship.
			That means that the spreading of copyrighted works harms all people that the works are spread to.
			Disney, a popular mega corporation that produces children&apos;s media in my country, is incredibly evil, mostly directing their evil works on the impressionable minds of children.
			Copyright law and patent law are two of the greatest evils of mankind.
		</p>
		<p>
			Do you see?
			These two very different viewpoints come from two very different value sets.
			There&apos;s no absolute evil and absolute good, because there can be no complete consensus on what should be classified as harm, destruction, or misfortune.
		</p>
		<p>
			Thanks your your response as well!
			Discussion this with you has forced me to crystallise and understand my own thoughts better.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Nothing is inherently good or evil because there is no ultimate judge of such.
			There&apos;s no viewpoint that acts as a &quot;one true viewpoint&quot;, so there will always be someone who disagrees.
			I just wrote up a post a little above about how I think Disney, a children&apos;s media corporation in my country, is incredibly evil.
			Most would label them as good at best and benign at worst.
			Without a &quot;one true opinion&quot;, it completely depends on who you ask.
		</p>
		<p>
			You ask whether I think murder and corruption are evil.
			Yes, but only from my particular viewpoint.
			I judge those as evil, but they&apos;re evil only because I deem them such, not because they are, by nature, somehow bad.
			I pay more attention to corruption than murder, though I&apos;ll give a murder example because it&apos;s difficult to even find a parallel to corruption outside human societies.
			In fact, without a society and upper-level authorities, corruption doesn&apos;t even really exist.
		</p>
		<p>
			Animals kill each other all the time, for various reasons.
			Human beings, though they don&apos;t like to admit it, are in fact animals.
			Just look it up on Wikipedia: we&apos;re a species of ape, which explains our almost gorilla-shaped bodies.
			Our faces are a bit different and we have less muscle mass and hair, not to mention that possess the upper-level intelligence needed to form societies.
			However, at the end of the day, we&apos;re just animals that may have evolved a little too far for what is healthy for the planet.
			What makes a human killing a human any different than, say, a lion killing a lion?
			Seriously, when a new male takes over a lion pride, it&apos;ll kill off all the existing cubs to spare resources for its own cubs.
			Male lions kill off <strong>*babies*</strong> of their own species like it&apos;s nothing.
			But we, as humans, would deem that to be evil if we did something similar.
			Can you imagine going out and killing babies just because they&apos;re not your genetic relatives, and you want the town&apos;s resources directed to your children instead of the other children?
			I certainly couldn&apos;t.
			I&apos;d label that as evil, but evil is a strictly-human concept, and it varies from person to person.
			(Though I think most humans would agree about baby-murdering being evil, regardless of the motive.)
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I never said there&apos;s no clear definition of good and evil.
			I said it&apos;s a human construct and differs from person to person.
			I feel very strongly about evil and I want it gone.
			I couldn&apos;t feel that way without a clear definition of what it even is.
		</p>
		<p>
			As for seeing a god (Yahweh, I assume), you say you&apos;re proof of someone that&apos;s seen a god.
			But what proof are you?
			In what way are you able to prove you&apos;ve seen this god?
			Without further information, what you call seeing a god, I probably call seeing a hallucination.
			Or perhaps it was an illusion.
			Humans are programmed to see faces, so we see faces everywhere, even where they clearly don&apos;t exist.
			I&apos;ve seen them in tree bark, on stones, et cetera.
			I swear, I even see a face on the moon, when it&apos;s full enough.
			That doesn&apos;t mean there&apos;s actually a face there though; it&apos;s a giant rock, so I don&apos;t expect it to have a face.
			I mean you no disrespect, but without further information about what you saw, I can only make wild and vague guesses.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I certainly don&apos;t rule it out as an absolute impossibility.
			There could very well be one or more gods.
			I can only rule out specific gods, based on what is said about them.
			For example, Zeus lives on Mount Olympus, but there&apos;s no gods there.
			We&apos;ve checked.
			Therefore, Zeus, at least the version of Zeus described by the Greeks, does not exist.
			Modern religions tend to place gods in metaphysical areas that cannot be reached and checked though.
			We can rule out some of them, or some versions of them, that break the laws of logic, but there will always be self-consistent myths of gods that we can neither prove nor disprove.
			I&apos;d be lying if I didn&apos;t admit that.
		</p>
		<p>
			It&apos;s worth noting too that I believe that if a god or gods exist, I don&apos;t think it&apos;s one or ones described by any practices religion.
			If a god or gods had the power to make themselves known and actually wanted to be known, we&apos;d be united in religion.
			We&apos;d know who our masters were.
			If a god or gods didn&apos;t care or lacked the ability to make themselves known, we&apos;d have a world in which several religions popped up and absolutely none of them were right.
			Statistically speaking, what are the chances that someone would guess the details accurately?
			Seeing as we have so many religions, I can only assume that we&apos;re not in a world in which a god or gods wants to be known and can make it so.
			I can only assume that there either are no gods or we&apos;re in this second world described, in which all known religions are wrong but a god or gods still do exist.
		</p>
		<p>
			It&apos;s also worth noting that I haven&apos;t studied all religions.
			It&apos;s not the way all gods run things that I object to, it&apos;s specifically Yahweh: the god of Christianity, Judaism, and the Muslim faith.
			(Muslims know this god as Allah, but it&apos;s the same god.
			He just has many names.)
			Yahweh seems needy, self-serving, subjugating, judgemental, over-controlling, and to be quite frank, very evil.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			My apologies.
			You&apos;re right then, we&apos;re on the same side.
			You can&apos;t blame a god for all your problems, but not for the good things that happen.
			Well, you could, but it&apos;d be a completely unfounded argument.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Birds ...
			People are afraid of the weirdest things.
			Then again, I had a nightmare about a spider last night, and how many spiders kill (or even seriously injure) people in the city?
			Most spiders are pretty harmless.
		</p>
		<p>
			I understand being out of tune with horror.
			I don&apos;t indulge much in horror either, though for different reasons than you.
			I&apos;m just not really into it.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Your description of entitled people sounds just like my mother.
			Any time she wants something, she just expects to have it given to her.
			She doesn&apos;t even want to have to <strong>*ask*</strong> for it!
			I&apos;ve heard her complain repeatedly about people not giving her what she thought she should have.
			I&apos;ve always asked if she&apos;d made her desires known to those that could fulfil them, and she always replies that she shouldn&apos;t have to.
			They should just know and offer.
			Talk about entitled!
			And she does this with coworkers, family, strangers ... everyone.
		</p>
		<p>
			I have never heard a Christian refer to us as Yahweh (the Christian god)&apos;s pets!
			I mean, it&apos;s always seemed that way to me.
			It seems like according to what the bible says, we&apos;re not a loved family of him.
			We&apos;re his playthings, his toys.
			But Christians don&apos;t seem to admit that to themselves.
			I can completely understand being cool with that.
			I&apos;m not, but I can understand the thought process of believing that to be okay.
			But what I don&apos;t get is how people can so blatantly ignore the conditions of the relationship with Yahweh.
			And like you said, we might be mere parasites to him.
			I appreciate your honesty and frankness, especially to yourself.
		</p>
		<p>
			You say those that passionately oppose theism set up faulty assumptions and insufficient samples, but I see that coming from those that passionately support theism as well.
			Humans don&apos;t often set up arguments correctly without sufficient data (or even with it, often enough), and we don&apos;t have the data we need.
			Anyone claiming to know for sure if there are gods or not is either lying or delusional.
			Either way, you&apos;re going to get a lot of faulty logic from those people.
			It&apos;s the passionate ones you&apos;ve got to worry about, as they claim to have the answers no one has.
		</p>
		<p>
			I&apos;m glad you understand morality is subjective and relative, too.
			Few people get that.
			It&apos;s so simple, yet people don&apos;t get it, even if you walk them through it.
			It&apos;s like ... they think their own morality is the one true morality, without exception.
			It&apos;s pretty conceited, if you ask me.
			I love all your examples on that, too!
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		I took a couple of quizzes today.
		One of the questions on the first quiz was:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			According to the Gifford Lecture on Polytheism and Monotheism, when two or more tribes got together, the number of divinities would:
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		One of the available options was:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			d. Who’s Gifford?
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		Seriously?
		Why would you even put that as an option?
		Not only is it an admission of not having studied the lecture, it&apos;s also so clearly not the answer they&apos;re looking for.
		Another question, this time from the second quiz:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Are you qualified to analyze literature?
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		One of the options:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			b. No because I will never have the right answer.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		Um.
		What?
		What sort of defeatist attitude is that!?
		It&apos;s not that you&apos;ll not know for sure that you did it correctly, but that you&apos;ll <strong>*never*</strong> have the right answer.
		You&apos;ll <strong>*always*</strong> get it wrong.
		Even if you were guessing every time, with no idea what you were saying, I&apos;d think you&apos;d get it right at least sometimes.
		Even a broken clock is right once each day, right?
	</p>
</section>
END
);
